


our days of hollow bone

by fireflyingby



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Blood, Blood Magic, Emotional Manipulation, Established Relationship, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Internal Conflict, M/M, Magic, Pre-Call Down the Hawk, Rituals, Sex, golem toad, post-trk, sorcery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-07-24 19:01:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20019454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fireflyingby/pseuds/fireflyingby
Summary: All the king's witches and all the king's men bleed to put Cabeswater back together again.  Post-TRK: mourning, magic, marshes and loose ends.





	1. threadbare

Viscera of oil pigment and shadow, something wicked in the wetland comes, mouth of nettles nipping at its feet. There’s a quality of muted light in the marshes that paralyzes time as granules of dust over amber, night and day stacked, merged and infinite.

This is how Ronan finds him: on the fifth day, crouched at the swamp shore and curling in like a child who can’t count far enough to tally his hurts. The dark stab of his bluing eyes, ocean that’s tasted a kill. And the iron red on him, on his hands and his knees, the breaking line of his shoulders, the tatters of his clothes. Between the lean whips of his fingers, sullying each crevice.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” Adam rasps, and the blood’s stained his teeth.

Ronan kneels beside him, between walls of cheap plastic in four-a-buck scrying bowls and battlements of rolled paper stitched with Maura’s impatient scribble.

He lifts Adam’s hands and kisses the knuckles clean.

\--

Houses and campers shy from soft ground. Trailers can’t broker permits in the marshes. Three days after Gansey shamelessly lifts his best hit from the Bible, Adam Parrish has built his castle.

Later, when Ronan sits him down in his bundle of charity blankets, Adam can’t say why he chose this, now, here. Seclusion, maybe. Another secret. Abomination of convenience. Large ambitions always dwarf themselves in the rot-stale wild west of Virginia.

This is how reckless teenagers die, a grim rural statistic. Came to the bog. Brought minimal provisions. Told not a soul. Found dead in a God damned ditch. The end, except crickets bleat on, and Adam’s a witch without a cause.

When he drifts closer to Ronan, it’s almost like before.

“You’re still bleeding,” Ronan hands out like communion, because only three of the four gashes on Adam’s bare calf are playing ball, and the last one’s weeping to seal in a rebellious streak. He cut cleanly, Adam did, if you have an eye for these things (Ronan’s blind). No deep wounds, no veins struck, no risk of long hurts beyond the impossible injury to his jeans, dripping inside and out of them, scattering debris. Only the trail of blood, to feed a brew that wrote out half a summoning circle two feet away, futile.

Blood freely given, never an unwilling sacrifice. They learned that lesson once before.

“Salting,” Adam murmurs, frowning already to memorise a dissonance of instructions on filthy paper, before twilight poisons into darkness. They have a flashlight, but now the reading’s easier. A flashlight, the blankets, two bottles of water and a modest arsenal of chalk, carvings, _tea recipients_ , knives, scissors, thermometers and timers nicked ( _borrowed, Lynch_ ) from Boyd’s shop – and stone.

There’s an expiry date on their excursion, then. If these are the supplies, Ronan just has to wait out the show.

Has to wait and dig himself under Adam’s skin like shrapnel. “Why? People have reasons, Parrish.”

“No.”

“Yes, they fucking do.”

“No,” Adam snaps with the academic indifference of a teacher who’s sick of saying one and one make two, ”I have a purpose, because this isn’t done. I’m dead or it’s done, and until then, we don’t talk causation, because there’s no result to backtrack.”

Ronan’s head rolls back, til there’s only the sky before him, the sky and its wan stars, and he’d howl at a moon that won’t reveal herself. “My fucking boyfriend’s sulking because his little league home-made slasher flick isn’t breaking the box office, and I’m supposed to trade semantics.”

Near him, Adam stops, sets his papers down in crisp rustles. The afterthought, “That one, then. That’s the word.”

Ronan’s breath staggers. “If you wanted to pull another one out of your SAT list or your ass, you should have unclenched faster.” 

Boyfriend. Crush. Wildling paramour with bleed-out tendencies in the woods. Witchy hook up. Whatever label Adam will tolerate before his soul, in symbiosis with his wallet, screams murder. His nails make hollow sounds of scratching at wool that yields but doesn’t give. The blanket denies his crisis. “I didn’t want to assume.”

“You didn’t _want_ , Parrish.”

Silence stretches like a familiar cat, filling out the negative space between them, pushing at its borders. ( _What do you want_?)

Adam’s fingers gripping his shoulder still leave a bloody print. He’s crossed his legs at the ankle, the wounded one high, the shroud of his jeans pulled up to his knee to air out his shame. He pinches at one cut, opening the flows again in a sedate drip that he hisses to revisit. “This… stings. Every part of it. Every moment. And it doesn’t compare to _wanting_ like I want.”

It strikes him, all at once, that this wasn’t about Ronan. That Adam couldn’t be troubled to warn he’d be gone for days on end, couldn’t spare a thought for Ronan’s worries, couldn’t burden himself with a trifling conversation about, say, the aftermath of their once and only king, barely recovering from his unearthly toils – about Blue combing away at the bruises on her face and her parentage – about Ronan, waking dreamless, the air in his lungs pregnant and heady with dust at his old-new home.

This isn’t about them, any of them. Adam’s living would always be eclipsed by his dead.

Birds cry out the night hunt, snarling. Water splashes ungainly for Adam’s wash, and what Ronan hears is, “Cabeswater. You’re trying to get Cabeswater back.” He laughs, rolls his shoulder in a high arc to unsaddle the weight of the world. “You’re such an addict. Tell me the truth.”

Adam shrugs. “Blue pill, red pill.”

Sometimes, he’s like this, talks in spades and in colours, in fragments of words and figments of an imagination profoundly deranged. Ronan would never hurt him. Ronan wants to wring his neck.

“You’re doing all this for…” A circlet of weeds and withered branches to crown a dirt-raised king. At the back of Ronan’s mouth, chalk and gravel collide in war cries of friction. Scylla and Charybdis, his teeth grind down. “I don’t need your hipster vintage pop culture references to smell out evasion.”

They stare ahead at water, stink of rot and streaks of mire along its yawning length.

Adam throws a stone in first. It lands in a chaos of ripples that Ronan scoffs at, unimpressed with the distance and the wave, the chaste gain of disaster. His stone drops farther, but Adam’s next throw is stronger, scares frogs off the fat perch of a waxy water lily, and they keep at the game for rage and sport.

He’s about to pronounce himself the winner of this and every other race he’s run with a head start, but then Adam grabs him by the lapels of his jacket, twists and turns and coaxes him, gravity guiding his fall. Ronan heaves at first, but Adam’s parted mouth is on his, wet, grudging, needy, all teeth. “Go home, Ronan,”

Counteroffer, “Tell me to stay.”

“Go home,” says Adam, and sneaks his hand into Ronan’s jeans, “Go home, go home, go home.”

“Cool,” Ronan gasps, because there’s a sly grip on his cock that learns faster than Ronan, chest a mad bird’s cage, ever dreamed it could in the back of a church pew, “So I’m staying.”

\--

After. There is an after. The world turns, the drip of water, somewhere, ghosts the hidden nooks of his awareness. Sex happened, and the earthquake of Ronan’s religious crisis didn’t even earn helicopters and warning signs in its wake.

Night’s done them piss-poor favours. The crackle of stepped grass and the rolls of stone beneath him reminds him why the great outdoors is a fantastic setup for soppy novels of life-long romance, and an all-you-can-eat buffet for fleas and vermin beyond. A shiver prickles his skin, nape to the balls of his feet.

He feels, equidistantly, victim and vector, alive and a body thief. A subtle accomplice to the whims and weakness of his flesh. Devoured, a cannibal’s feast that turns his captive’s belly into his castle. Adam waits inside his blood, settles on his dampened skin, shrouds the animal miasma of his body, only to displace it. Coexistence could never satisfy a parasite.

But then Adam rolls nearer, dressing the side of Ronan’s arm like a second skin, his unnerving beauty a clean, protracted drunkenness.

There’s no weight to him, when his head drops on Ronan’s shoulder, only moonlight and the yells of coming rain. And he whispers, “Hi.”

Ronan brings blanket mountain down on their heads.

\--

Come the first morning of Ronan’s summer vacation into the Hamptons via hell, Adam’s doing his one-man rendition of doctor Frankenstein tiptoeing through twenty walks of shame. Out of principle, Ronan raises himself groggily on his elbows to offer a middle-fingered salute: for waking him, for leaving him, for startling the blankets out of inertia and leaving the morning chill to carve out his skin.

“Mugwort,” Adam says by way of answer. Then, studiedly, with the slow, owlish turn of his head, like a dog condemned to a trick beneath his dignity, “I’ll be back.”

There’s a pouch in his hands, flat basket of weave and twine. Beneath the thin apology of his jacket, he’s wearing a fresh t-shirt, in a glaring betrayal that he, unlike Ronan, hasn’t forgotten his hygiene along with his wits, and he brought along spares. Ronan vows to steal his toothbrush.

They trade in manly grunts that equate, without wasting syllables: _Good morning, dearest, darling, b-word, how are you today? Very well, thank you, off I go to the coal mine with the other dwarves for random bullshit plants that definitely don’t exist, google them, just to avoid an awkward conversation. That sounds great, love bunny, and do you still plan to tell me zero, zip, zilch and nada? Ummmmmm, yeah, sweetie. Oh, okay, honey bear, well, have a good day now._

The sentiment isn’t lost in translation.

The acoustics mock him. Alone, Ronan slips back to the ground, cursing every matinal duck and egret, every spear of crisp morning sun that incapacitates his eyes. Scrooge-spirited, he counts last night’s scraps of happiness, stacked and compiled in a beige body bag at the outskirts of memory. Prime real estate for scavengers, vivid under the howling drop of pink-tinted glass. Last night, the gutting nostalgia edit: I love yous, scattered on his skin, a Greenpeace effort sabotaged by reckless largesse to pollute the world with throwaway pledges. _I love you now, I’ll love you tomorrow._

Maybe the grunts need an orchestra and backup dancers.

\--

In the span of twelve hours in the marshes, nothing has tried to kill Ronan beyond his lover’s ego. This is fine. He fishes through the blanket folds and decides, unilaterally, that even if war is abated, diplomatic relations should still limpidly proclaim that the enemy of the Adam-Ronan empire is the dissident Adam Parrish. All’s fair in dragging the tyrant down. 

Adam’s papers reveal much of what Ronan had suspected and less than he had hoped. Adam’s method isn’t mad but volatile, approaching _resurrection_ in a melange of magic, archaeology, horror movie clichés and science befitting a dilettante. The hope is to revive a small-scale specimen, then expand that model exponentially to the whole of Cabeswater. Ronan can pay respects to a pipe dream.

Adam has already ticked three boxes in Ronan’s absence – chants (you’re tone deaf, Parrish), runes (fucking nerd), summon rites in blood circles (half the blood was on you, genius) – and has a healthy list ahead of scrying and burning and ghouls.

The parting line is changed ink, blue after rows of dark, fresh enough to stain Ronan’s thumb: tantric sex rites, and a question mark.

Last night becomes this morning becomes the quid-pro-quo reality of Ronan’s worth.

Adam’s toothbrush plunges in the pond.

\--

They stall a fight with old-school necromancy.

Adam returns with his basket and his mugwort and his carousel of frowns, blitzing in and phasing out. He sees Ronan cross-legged on the blankets, eyes piercing over the laid-out paper trail of Adam’s crime. He sees the arrogant rise of Ronan’s chin, the black emptiness of his stiffening posture, the storm of his grating teeth.

Ronan knows, because he has planned out the theatrics of Adam’s reckoning down to the last visual increment. He bled yesterday. Let him join Russian nobility in haemorrhage now. 

“I’m staying,” Ronan instigates, before he can broker disagreement.

Their standoff outlasts two dying breaths and a swan song.

“Okay,” Adam agrees, remorse thickened by practicality. He sets down his basket, and this time he holds nothing back, not the pungent quality of the plants he sets to air out in his toy bowl, not the resting corpse of a prime specimen of Bufo Bufo, the friendly toad, buried beneath them.

Dating 101: no movies on the first date, aim for a quiet, low-stake activity to break the ice and coalesce a bond. Dinner, dancing, stargazing. Reviving roadkill.

Ronan feels his cheeks ripen before he steels himself, looming over the frog Adam lays carefully at his feet to inspect, yes, there’s a substantial, bulbous swell of sickness on its side to certify the obvious conclusion.

“I didn’t kill it,” Adam confirms beside him, sinking to his knees to let his gaze wander the lonely lines and acute angles that build an amphibian cascade of bone and skin. There was life here once, an immensity of seconds ago. The swamps will keep their dead, Ronan knows, but the business of flies that starts to dart above them recognises not an ounce of that sanctimony.

It’s inevitable, when Adam brings his stick and starts poking.

“Break it down for me, Parrish. What’s this part? Intro to Psychosis? Witch hazing?”

“Baptism.” Adam’s stick catapults the toad on its back, ready for every classical dissection Aglionby recoiled from on pains of animal cruelty charges staining their illustrious door. “Bring the fire.”

Then, swatting flies, Ronan names it, “Guilt?” “

Adam looks up, smile a lonely thing, cracked and crippling. “Fuck you.”

“You did. It’s on your paper.” One of them can push enough buttons to turn this war nuclear. Ronan has no mind for quarter. “Tell me this isn’t guilt about Cabeswater. Lie to me.”

Adam scoffs, “Asks the Catholic boy scout.”

“Asks your boyf - ” 

He has crossed into no-man’s land, and the firing drill knows nothing of his flag. Snow and white, he waves it, tapping Adam’s cold, keen hand once, then again, to telegraph perfect solidarity against Ronan’s stupidity. Peace.

It’s enough, until it isn’t.

“Stop,” Adam says slowly, disdain fulgurating between them, one man down, casualties to rise. “That word means something to you. Don’t make it so I can use it against you.”

Ronan could kill for some fucking cookies. Sugar, spice and everything nice that never did behold his _boyfriend_ stripping away his snake skin, to spawn into this fledgling thing, raw, tender and abandoned, a bundle of paranoia and ego that forensics will pin down as a fraud of modern man.

He nods, by the end of it. Nods like an obedient puppet that Adam turns into living thing again, dragging his stick in the air to bat a fat, beastly fly in a slowed arc.

“That counts for two of yours,” he says, just as Ronan sing-songs over him, “That still only counts as one.”

\--

Shame of earthly flesh, the toad’s erected on a bed of flat stone, the morning sun lavishing the last of its ablutions. Skin withering like parchment. Nearby, pond water sings a lullaby of simple-minded ripples Ronan wants to stir with his foot. 

He’s pacing, furious like a house cat who senses an intruder it can’t claw at or keep. He won’t partake of devilry, but his presence still abides it.

Adam looks blankly from the toad’s bedside, where he’s stuffed rune pebbles in its mouth, doused it in scrying water, painted its belly with gore of yarrow and chamomile.

Never take a girl who knows more than you do to bed, Declan warned him, back in the day when machismo, misogyny and the accident of a two-day ceasefire had nudged him into the delusion that he could inform Ronan’s dating life.

_Or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead_. Deutoronomy, the Father chiming in for his dead father. 

The sun’s getting in his eyes, warming his temples, baking his brains. Cry-more philosophy and domestic nostalgia never used to be his shitshow of choice.

The world groans, while nothing happens. Then, Ronan feels a phantasm touch on his arm, and he spooks, but drops down where Adam calls him, obedient like every dog who only knew one feeding hand.

He could kill for a cigarette when Adam inspects him, much like the toad before, absent the stick. Then, he lifts the bowl of plant mush before him, nods at it and at Ronan’s mouth expectantly, and Ronan raises his eyebrows, but doesn’t need a rundown of instructions to spit. (In retrospect, Adam may have wanted him to swallow.)

It’s mixed in, thinned with the mugwort, then curdled again with pond clay. Adam pours it down on the slab, then shapes it with unexpected artistry in the shape of the toad beside it, sketching out its features, its eyes and its wide mouth, the ridges of its toes.

The runes again, this time in the clay model. The brews. The wait.

Until colour bursts into clay where there was nothing and nothingness. Until texture firms on dirt-dressed limbs. The clay toad recasts itself, a faint copy as faithful as a man who swears by the Bible but runs from Sunday church and grace. Froggy sisters, not twins.

Its dark eyes pop open.

Holy shit.

“What happened?” he runs after Adam, into him, close enough to stitch like patchwork to his shadow.

“You. You happened. It woke up for you.” The blue of Adam’s eyes must sting under his drawing lids. He exhales, and Ronan lives in the stretch of his lungs, in the lull of his voice. “There’s… so much of you.”

Ronan’s magic is wonderful, brilliant, resplendent, special. Redux. Cheap finger’s press on the record player. Rewind for that same old song.

With laughter, Ronan breaks the spell, “That’s what she –”

Adam, dourly, “You only know one girl. One girl without hooves.”

Careful with the nominal virtue of Richard Gansey the Third’s fated beloved. For once, Ronan’s too stricken by folly (laughter) to argue the point.

He whistles, categorically excited, but you know, still not impressed, because, whatever Parrish, “I made zombie toad happen. Even my hell minions are low-effort drop outs.”

However many shares of his soul Adam’s doled out, the devil’s cashing in. He leans back, confident Ronan will catch him (he does), paler than Ronan likes to remember him. So pale, he’s only seen Adam the once like this, hanging by rails, deserted by his hearing, depleted altogether.

“That might earn you points in heaven,” he whispers, and Ronan’s sitting again, legs bracketing Adam’s, arms the ivy that fastens around his waist. Try denying _this_ sappy travesty, _boyfriend_.

“Before or after the violence, profanity and gay paramour?” he asks, mostly to keep talking.

Adam hums, and gasps when the dark hint of Ronan’s stubble grazes his ear. “That’s not the word.”

The word’s thrall only stays as long as it’s unspoken. They sit and let its magic unfold.

It’s Ronan with the stick, minutes after, turning the bright-eyed golem-toad over. “Off you go, Kermit. Remember us in hell or Hollywood.”

The first tears of rain should have signalled his fortunes.

\--

They bury both toads two hours later.

The last flutter of the golem’s pulse, slender and warm, echoes in vibrato against Ronan’s fingertips. Honoured pawn in Adam Parrish’s suicide play for creationist conquest. 

Ronan spells an alphabet of bile and croaked hate, and Adam’s second ear pretends it too is deaf. They shouldn’t have done this, shouldn’t have gamed a system rigged for defeat or despair, shouldn’t have tried. Breath spills wheezing out of the golem-toad’s lungs in spells of stale dysfunction. Beady eyes gut him, unblinking black.

For two hours, it vegetated unmoving on it slab of stone, until Adam dignified it with a pronouncement: comatose, non-sentient, brain-dead. Prime candidate for the mercy kill Ronan suspects, on a level that batters the inside of his stomach, was queued up on the experiment list. _I hate this_.

Rasp of a lighter, Adam sparks alive a pyre of broken bedsheet. ( _Cheaper than bundles of matches_ , he tells Ronan, face sharp with bone. And what he means is, _Less throwaway evidence._ )

Earlier, Ronan had tried to suffocate it, and the toad stared, and the dull ache of rain whispered its worst around him. He broke before its cavernous bones did.

Before pale flame, Adam takes the golem from him, reverent like the mother of a stillborn, weighing it in his hands. Finding it, parts and whole, somehow wanting.

“Never again,” Ronan says, and Adam’s gaze haunts the corners of his mouth, trying it for words Ronan speaks again, and again, and again, only slower.

He leaves Adam to fire and ember, to the first animal fumes of meat and fat breaking. Then clay, only clay. Dirt burning. He burns both toads, for caution. Two are enough to keep vigil: Adam, Adam’s ambition. 

Thirty steps away, counted, Ronan digs a hole the span of silver coins, and he crosses himself once, in haste and shame, when Adam’s back is a pirates’ flag of bone protruding through tatters of cotton.

Ash splinters dance down into dirt. Ronan lids them with mud.

Their treasure sleeps deep beneath their feet.

\--

“Ronan.”

Late morning and rain: he takes Adam by the wrist and walks them halfway out of the crags, before Adam sinks behind him, the drag of his feet scratching like fork tines on porcelain, glass. 

“We’re done here,” Ronan bites back, always behind him, always pulling, always initiating. Always wanting first and more.

Adam’s grief is a striking picture, white against the grey-dark rivulets of swamp water in overspill. Beneath their feet, the land is drenched, bedraggled by tufts of green that persist doggedly against the dirge of extinction. Soon, it will all be marshes, plunging, drowning, washing out sin. Sea and storm. The great deep.

Adam calls out (again). “I can’t yet. I can’t. Ronan -”

Adam’s math is too good to miscalculate so profoundly: he kisses Ronan before his time. 

Always pulling, and now pushing. Rejection is a fine power to exercise. “We’re done. _We_ are done.”

“Ronan, stay.”

And Ronan’s laughter claws its way out of him, shreds him to ribbons, leaves him for Christmas trees and anniversary gifts, to hang and flaunt. Here lies Ronan Lynch, the remains of his agony. Here, enjoy them all. “God damn you. God damn your eyes.”

Deep, down deep, farther in his pockets, the keys to the BMW anchor him away from the abyss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RIP golem toad.


	2. extant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam retaliates with a languid string of butchered Latin from his papers that sends Ronan groaning, waving his cigarette like a concert baton, “That’s volueris, for those of us not lucky enough to be partially deaf.”

Lunch is coarse peanut butter and granular jelly, the pre-packaged Noble Prize-winning mercy of a gas station eighteen miles out. Ronan came back, neither of them says between the greedy swallows of growing boys with hunger pangs for carbs and autophagia. Ronan couldn’t keep away.

They feast on the bench of a downed tree, scavenged with impunity by every squirrel that remembered its birth right. Here, rodent rebels and their army of fleas lived. There, they stripped bark down with hisses of claw and thin menace of teeth. Exalt them.

Now and then, the pendulum of Adam’s ankle swings and hooks, wooing the inch of bared skin between the clash of two designer titans: Ronan’s carefully carved jeans and his dirt-maimed sneakers.

Ronan doesn’t dignify piss-poor overtures with more than the hike of his brow. At long last, Adam gives up the game, sips of no-brand Coke swill signing away his sophisticated claim to grace. “I hurt you.”

Damn right. Damn fucking right, straight, jackpot, ten out of ten, Parrish. Wound bleeding. ( Drag out your red bowl again, catch the stream. )

Adam is (still) not done here. “But you’re not cutting me out. How is it different? You. Me. Him. _Kavi_ -”

Ronan’s _second_ brow joins the first, siblings in incredulity. Shots fired. “Don’t.”

“Kavin –“

“Don’t say that name.” They both know Ronan won’t warn again.

Adam’s gaze wanders, crumbs speckling the corner of his mouth, trying for the poetry and song of beauty marks or sun-stained freckles. Ronan flinches, but doesn’t give into the travesty of brushing them away with his thumb.

“I’m not speaking ill of the dead," Adam presses, bull taking his time to storm the china shop. Joseph Kavinsky, my boy Joe, Joey K, just K. Just the wilderness of him, gaunt like the spread of pox that water scissors into stone. Arm proprietary over Ronan’s shoulder, while Proko-porky-piggy-P-boy slinks close to whisper the sweet nothings of who said this and meant that and had their kneecaps broken for it. The road welcomed Kavinsky’s savagery like the exotic gifts of a visiting prince. ( Fuck the futility of amateurs. Ronan is king. )

“It was ride or die til the road trip ended,” he’ll give Adam that. Crashed and burned, K did. Click click boom.

“You couldn’t rock-paper-scissors for the driver’s seat?”

“One-twenty miles an hour, Parrish. You don’t step up to that heat just to sit your ass down in the spectator’s seat after.”

The tight pull of Adam’s brows threatens them to anaemia or extinction. “Okay. You both had something to prove.”

There are a handful of steps between Adam and his cross, each one a scientific and Christian milestone. Ronan wants to speed things along now, to set his fangs on his jugular, to drag him to the grave.

“We had something to kill,” he parries instead, and holds his hand out for the pittance of Adam’s drink. Swallow, don’t spit. Once it’s in your mouth, don’t think about it. “And the house ran out of mirrors.”

The can drags his hand down, heavier than he expected, the bright baton of a racing relay. At the dark edges of despair, stranded on an island without teen dream magazine quizzes and Spotify, the scarcity of their supplies might praise them. Here, it’s miserly and stale, pointless but for the warmth of Adam’s mouth on the rim of the can, when Ronan drinks after him.

“Dream more,” Adam says, vulture on the bones. Ronan’s liver shivers. “Dream me a room of them.”

Mirrors and glass, labyrinthine, and the trail of shard crumbs that lead to witches’ corpses. He knows that story. He’s heard names: Persephone, like profanity, always at the forefront of his mind. She died young. That’s the curse of politeness, _She died young_ , because she couldn’t _die meaningfully._

“I know that rabbit hole,” Ronan says, and hands back the can, so the greedy tips of Adam’s fingers can scald him, wet here and there with the kiss of pallid rain before.

The swamp is in swelter, despite the season. Every second breath drowns, and Adam’s lips carve it, the _Oh_ , the circlet of muted gasps that always precede his private understandings. Oh, but not everyone’s out to get him. Oh, but not every day’s a war. “I’m not falling.”

“The fuck.” There is an acceptable number of times he can look Adam Parrish in the eye and laugh, and Ronan’s fast moving to exceed his quota. “Look at you.”

Adam shrugs, drags his can up for the last taste like someone’s third-rate cousin who’s a self-styled actor and only now remembers, minutes into his fizzling scene, that every prop must be used to be convincing and every gun should be shot (in Ronan’s head.) “Vertigo. It’s a sickness.”

Baby. Sweetheart. Bad luck, but Ronan rustles thinned-out plastic to pick out a bottle from the bags behind him, and toasts him with water. “It’s a symptom.”

“You don’t trust me.” Adam smiles like a particularly smart boy who’s led his essay argument to a cheap conclusion. “You didn’t trust him.”

Magic and math and whatever mould carved its way into Ronan’s lungs, black and breathing. What’s there to trust in the world?

He kicks Adam’s shin, but nods after. The academic conclusion. “Throw the lighter in the creek.”

No means to erase the body, no more toad corpses. A price for every joy ride.

Minutes later, Adam pays it.

\--

There are moments, after, when he sees Adam clearly: not the watery illusion of his body, following the swamp course, but the exoskeleton of his purpose. _You don’t know what you’re doing, you never knew, you’re making it up as you go along. Like everyone._

Good. How alive Ronan feels, feverish when he reduces a god to man’s own stature.

And there are bones every time his gaze drags down: shrivelled and dissolving, defiled of their tenderest entrail, the rot of their marrow. Levigated by foot or hoof or rain or ashes, until they sprout the start of green, life scattered carelessly. The blood coin of beauty glistens like the ink-wet pages of a war book.

More often than not, his thoughts are bubbling brushstrokes of white on waves cresting and crashing, howling for new precipice.

He remembers: Matthew stranded in the meadow, eyes open and studious for the first time, the last time, wider than Ronan had ever seen them before – the black shorts of the nursery trussing up his podgy legs, so thrilled only an hour before that the priest had said he might start wearing long pants to his first confession, come spring. Running away, because he wasn’t their brother, wasn’t Niall and Aurora’s son, looked nothing like Declan or Ronan, and everyone knew, all the choir boys said so, _everyone knew._

Look at the gold of him, his hair, the swelling health of his rosy cheeks, the limp disaster of his movements, when they apply hazardously to a sport. _Everyone knew._

They found him together, Ronan and Declan, and Matthew’s fingers soft in each other hands, like the dough mom raised for supper rolls, and they took him up the hill for dad to speak to. Together and far away they were a postcard of tender family, gentled by light that sharpened on Ronan’s jaw, when Declan’s fist bore down (the first time, this was the first, and not the last, and _they_ wore their long pants, and Declan his cravat, stitched together from an old cuff of dad’s, mossy and tame).

 _Look what you did_ , Declan snarled, _Look what you did to him, he’ll always wonder, even after dad lies, both of you always lie, look what you did._

Ronan laughed, laughed until he was hit more, laughed until his throat was a fishnet of scratches, laughed until the sound of it shivered with sobs, and blood lined the Sunday carcass of his church collar.

He’s laughing now, and the blur of midday heat caresses his cheek. Ahead, Adam’s face is tight like wet rope, surveying dirt like his kingdom, every nook and cranny known. He steps gingerly, but for the crush of his foot on growing grass, or the protest of rubble against his cheap, crumbling sole.

“It’s different being here, isn’t it? It makes you think,” Adam says and taps Ronan’s cheek, once, then again, like a dog. Come along now.

They are searching for lost things Ronan can’t name and that Adam, the look of him lost and drifting like ripple and wave, can’t decipher. It was funny for another half-scribbled text to Gansey, Ronan’s phone battery squealing the fast approach of ignoble death. Mystical, when he thought he spied the Virginia man’s _weed_ among Adam’s witching greens. But now, boredom’s harried his patience, like patches of stone peeking increasingly through fresh snow.

He’s at his wits’ end with the hippie bullshit.

Adam hasn’t got the memo yet. Adam is still circling the same perimeter they’ve studied for the past two hours with no signs of recognising his poor life choices and every ounce of the stubbornness to keep perpetuating them.

This place is like witchy Candyland. There’s the water for the scrying, the weeds and leaves that have always beholden women since the days of plague and yore. Men make war, but their wives heal it. Witches are practical creatures, grateful for the source. There are animals to commune with, shadows of tree, and, as of the past five minutes, long skins of tree bark to peer at with gravelly intensity, as if elder rings in each scar mark could outspiral Adam’s madness.

“I don’t know how to revive something using nothing,” Adam says, (finally, finally, _how alive Ronan feels_ , at long last) the first true thing since they’ve wandered in the swamp like schoolboys who never learned their lessons. “I don’t know how to do this.”

Great. Awesome. Good talk. Ronan’s turning around to fetch their blankets –

“But nothing dies here, because everything’s submerged. And if there are any witches left, they’ll tell us,” says Adam.

Fuck.

\--

They each have their soothsayer. Adam’s wants dead witches. Ronan puts his money on urban magic.

A credit to a long line of breathless bureaucrats and serviette-pushers, marathoning the Capitol between stalwart principles and motorcades: Gansey picks up his phone on the first try.

“He… hello?” This, as if he doubts his voice, his caller, or his luck. There’s an abrasive quality to his speech now, grainy like sugars that haven’t had the time or the momentum to dissolve in tepid tea. Resurrection chipped Adam’s sanity and castrated Gansey’s confidence.

“It’s me.” Except _me_ is a man Gansey’s hardly ever heard on the phone. “Whatever, Dick. Don’t make me say it.”

Straight up bullying. To the point. None of that creative fourth-grade ‘I’m moving on from messing with my food to messing with people, and also, I’m an artist’ nonsense.

“Yes, Clark Kent. I’m afraid this handy alien device that flashes your name along with your phone number already betrayed your secret identity.”

 _Ugh_ , and Ronan was so close to calling dibs on the Dark Knight. “Then?”

“I wasn’t expecting you, Ronan.” 

This time, yesterday morning, _I wasn’t expecting you_ , Adam’s serene smile and how the blood spoiled it. Ronan’s stomach churns with anxious rapture. “Join the club. You can make donations.”

Gansey’s laugh envelops him, warmer than resignation has a right to sound. “I don’t think I’m fit for public company, right now.”

Gansey’s face was slack with a long bruise last Ronan saw him, the signature of _indiscretion_. Polite society would make a night’s gossip of interrogating without asking the prevalent questions. Gansey would never make it out alive.

“Say the word, and I’m there,” Ronan says, and aches to find he means it.

“I’m not. I’m fine. But thank you for your concern, if this is that.”

“We broke Parrish.”

“We… broke Adam,” Gansey says tentatively, trying the words. “I didn’t think he _could_ be… wait. What exactly did _we_ do to Adam?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s very helpful.”

“I still don’t fucking know,” Ronan snarls, and the joyless dissatisfaction of waving his phone around with no chord to tangle around his fingers and no separate set device to throw at a wall is infuriating. “He’s weird. Weird for Parrish weirdness. Twelve on the Parrish weird scale.”

“I can see this is going to be a very productive conversation.” An eyeroll takes place in Monmouth that Ronan can time, quantify and qualify without seeing. It, too, scores a twelve out of ten.

“He’s in a swamp. Holed up with books and sticks and stones and I’ve got no one whose bones I can break, but he’s making me want to hunt that asshole down,” Ronan hisses. “He’s trying to resurrect Cabeswater.”

He doesn’t add, _Oh, and I’m in the swamp too_. Some tragedies call for hard drink.

He braces himself for a cataclysm of nerdy enthusiasm, because did you hear that? Books? Books and sticks and stones and dead things? Dick the Third is either epileptic with excitement or rubbing one out for the cause.

Silence toys with its food of seconds until they’re moments too large and fierce to kill. Finally, Gansey sighs _again_. “Has he considered not every dead thing is meant to come back?”

\--

Adam has. Adam hasn’t. Adam’s brought his papers and his broken drawings, the cheap pen Ben O’Connor lent him once then _forgot_ , purposed to scribbling down the secrets of the witchery ages. (Ronan’s teeth denting the ends of it, a gift another man’s given, not a contender, worse, a potential friend, frightful. God damned petrifying.)

This time, the circle Adam’s drawn is barren, chalk and stones and unlit candles lined awkwardly and distant, like estranged lovers who can’t bear postcoital pleasantries. Every axis point houses a slab of silvered glass, dusted with the footsteps of maggot-vermin. Adam watches his army of trinkets in silence, then nods and deigns to sit down, legs bent awkwardly beneath him, the hoot of a dark-winged bird scouring wet-heavy skies above. 

Ronan sits with him, slouches, then lights a cigarette. He plucks at wisps of smoke like musical string, and remembers the disdain of their boy who helped man the farm cows once, the boy who _was_ a man for him, when Ronan was a boy proper – the young, long-limbed thing who sold him his first smoke, half a cigarette stick at four times the going price, but lit for him, and no one telling. Lick your lips once, close them in, breathe, no, not so fast, not from your chest first, just, you know, hold half of it in. Let the smoke trickle down and fill your crevices, let it know you, like a fast and secret friend, and don’t tell your mom, or your dad, don’t tell a soul, and that’s five bucks tomorrow too, if you want one, he’ll keep the watch. There you go, honest grown-up, cigarette riding his lip. Smoking like a pro.

He inhales now, hard. Irreverent. 

Adam stares at him, tongue painfully, obviously itching to correct Ronan’s posture, as if at some point over the past few minutes his hair has stopped gelling with the little mud that isn’t scattered over his clothes. As if they have standards.

Adam retaliates with a languid string of butchered Latin from his papers that sends Ronan groaning, waving his cigarette like a concert baton, “That’s volueris, for those of us not lucky enough to be partially deaf.”

Adam swats the cigarette out of the way, but finishes his greeting words with stained dignity. It’s a long spell, by the only measure Ronan knows, Gansey’s whispered staccato in his old man’s desk, the both of them pouring over crumbling parchments won overpriced in an underground auction. They cackled between misspoken instructions then, Ronan’s Latin still too poor before Aglionby, whatever his complaints for private education, it’s done well by his Catullus, his Seneca, his verses. And Gansey’s Greek was poor before it was passable, and has only deteriorated with time and travel in parts where the Western world’s concept of _historical roots_ is corseted in babe swaddles. 

“…come from above, come from below,” Adam calls out, no scared boy in the night.

The air thickens, damp and crowding with the trail of Ronan’s tobacco and the crisp, feral quality of dying incense by Adam’s feet. It’s circled them, sandalwood and a sharp spindle of _sweetness_ , pricking Ronan’s fingertips.

He survives power more than he experiences it, magic older than the name cresting, whispering tendrils of breath his cheek. A chill ripples down Ronan’s back, fit of the skin tight over rounding muscle. He waits.

Nothing hears them here. Ridiculous boys spouting ridiculous nonsense, fit for the purpose of divine entertainment.

Then, whatever residues of Cabeswater’s magic still scrape and ride Adam’s skin infiltrate the ground, because it shakes under them in a shifting tide, upheaving and upsetting the shoreline with cracks deep and abyssal. Ants surge forward, in escape more than conquest, each one the leader of a dark multitude. They scuttle between Ronan’s legs, carrying the ash of his fresh cigarette, cold glints like starlight on a yawning sky, and _brother_?

 _Brother magician_? But Adam only stares down, and they are both conduits, spare parts, replaceable. They have no control over this.

“Are you listening?” Adam asks the ants and the air, cavernous as if the thing that lives inside him is lost in the labyrinth of his flesh, remembering him, itself, the strength they command.

The earth’s fissure opens like flowers to the sun, and the ants cut their path to water. Drown, they all drown, not one stops.

They cross Adam’s feet while rubble spills between his fingers. He looks with stupor Ronan’s mouth is slack enough to mimic, instinctively.

“Is anyone listening?” Adam asks, and Ronan laughs at him, laughs and arches his back and laughs again, because _the universe listened_ , and Adam still needs proof, a written document, logged evidence. The ants swarm in downpour, and stride past him, crawl on Ronan’s arms but never halt enough to pinch, and on and on they flow and flee, on and on, and to the water.

“We have a friend who’s lost to us. We have a friend who - ” Adam swears under his breath, timid and pale, like a man who’s never abided DC traffic (he hasn’t). “Tell us how to wake up our friend. Tell us how to – Ronan, get up from there – _tell us how to_ … if you… if… volueris…”

But he’s crushed by a sea of endless ant bodies bridging the gaps between reality and magic, and Ronan finds him, helps him, wraps his hands over Adam’s ankles and – that look of betrayal, that’s the ugliness Ronan meant to rouse – drags him down. For a half-second, Ronan worries for the bloodshed they’ll author in a place of the swamp’s worship, total annihilation, insurmountable carnage, an excess of strength –

Then Adam’s splayed down, flushed and flustered like a damsel, raising himself on his elbows while speckles of star ascend around him, where the ants were. Fireflies, now. No, pure light, fragmented and joining a whirlwind that turns hurricane, finding its death in water that eats without end or hunger.

An army of ants becomes a spiral of light becomes a quiet swirl in a stillborn sea.

Ronan’s cigarette tumbles on the ground, and he stubs it with the back of his hand. That same palm, a little burned, drags crunched sand over Adam’s cheek as the strings of his hair drift down – and then Adam’s on Ronan, over him, kissing him like a gazelle turned hunter.

“Volebant,” he whispers against Ronan’s mouth, and waves boom behind him. _They wished_.

And they spoke, how they spoke, how they wished to.

(Everyone listened.)

\--

Half an hour later of frolicking between weeds, Ronan hears a toad croak in the distance. Farther out, the mounds of mud rise like waiting wombs, inviting the splay of Ronan’s hand, his fingers. There’s liveliness inside fresh graves, storms of screams and possibility, unstitching flesh inwardly.

They might have been beautiful, those toads, without decay and fire. They might have inspired writers in their childhood, artists in their study, a generation of small children who were chasing their first friend.

He lies down, staring at the sky, Adam sprawled over him for his cover. The clouds watch back, flattened and expansive. Ronan asks first, “What will we be when we leave here, and we can’t do the shit we could today?”

Adam rolls off him and the swipe of his thumb over Ronan’s lips singes.

And he says, meandering, “Alive.”

\--

The molten gold of late afternoon is sunset and taffy chews, a pantomime of softness to dress the scars of Adam’s survival streak. The angle suits him, the light, the reflection – the stretch of his arm, enshrined in his nest of weeds, reaching over water for the tempting swells of nenuphar.

For a heartbeat, only one but treacherous, Ronan wishes he were a Gansey and Gatsby sort of creature, the bon vivant romantic who puts colonial conquest at the service of the _one time_ he can present his handkerchief to his lady love. Gansey would justify the grandeur, Declan the expense, Cheng the reckless abandon. Adam would love that moment – to have and to hold, always and forever, against his _boyfriend_.

“Don’t drink that,” he barks at Adam, as if he’s Opal or a child, reduced to instinct, “The water’s filthy.”

“The water’s filthy,” Adam mimics him, rough around every edge Gansey would remember to smooth. Ronan lets himself miss them, those moments of careless introduction when Adam still measured his syllables against the Aglionby paragon of social graces, then doled them out with frugality. When he still thought Ronan worthy of impressing, and didn’t look at him as he does now, glass-eyed and grey, stricken by dehydration.

Ronan lands by him, crouching over water tempestuously, threatening every roll and wave. Enemies of the pirate king beware, his name is Lynch, his kingdom is all shore under the heavens. His weapons are the harpoon, the firearm, the pithy wit and the stab of his elbow, aimed carelessly at Adam’s ribs: “You still a ragdoll?”

Adam’s arm slings up, then falls, dead weight down. Look, ma, no joints.

That decides it. “We’re not spending the night here again.”

Adam was lovely before, sedate and recklessly innocent, as if years in a Parrish household could have left him young. He’s lovelier now, spattered by indignation, the fire that could burn Ronan’s soul. “I’m not lea - ”

“You’re not leaving.” Ronan holds his hands up, both of them. Peace, they say. Peace. “We’ll be back in the morning.”

Warmth dissipated too quickly from the marshes, and Adam’s eyes are too soft on him, the melt of weak, conceding snow.

“I threw your toothbrush out,” says Ronan, then nods for him, and there is only salt and sea then, fire quieted, whiplashes of the willow tree tangling in the first yawn of wind.

It’s not his decision to take. And yet. (And yet, and yet, maybe.)

Late evening and rain, redux: he takes Adam by the wrist and walks them home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Swamps are hard to write.  
> 2\. Golem toad remembers.


	3. statecraft

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan blinks at him. Gansey blinks back. The Geneva conventions are summarily savaged in a targeted war of thick-lashed passive aggression.

Like a planet, Gansey pulls to himself, the force of his gravity subliming lung tissue into the very air it breathes, autophagic. At ten in the morning, Ronan opens his door and wants, very politely, to shut it in his best-slash-only-surviving friend’s face. Doesn’t.

Gansey appears, tight-lipped and well-defined, a sketch in pen tip against the swirling nebula of the past two days (pastels). He’s brought bagels.

Ronan snatches one, reconsiders his pick, goes in for seconds – then they eat, sat sullenly on the porch steps, like hooligans or activists protesting the great Parrish menace or the sad and lonely fate of unloved pastry goods.

“Let’s… rewind,” Gansey says politely, and wipes his mouth with his thumb and the thoughtfulness of a man who has tasted of carbs and indignity on this day, and knows all too well he’ll be returning. “What happened?”

“When?”

“…when?”

Not for the first time, Ronan swallows charitably to prolong his fun. “Which exact part of this colossal nightmare do you want me to revisit at length for your one-man audience?”

“Preferably, the one where at least something makes sense,” says Gansey, and the magnitude of what he asks seems to escape him, in the way mankind’s birth is only an oddity of statistics for an uncaring god. He must be indifferent to them, Ronan realises, now more than before. God watches and leaves, and Ronan toils under His scrutiny.

Under the stone-sharpened edge of Gansey’s eyes, searching him again. “Reviving animals. Collecting hallucinogens. Talking to spirits. Summoning… bugs?”

“Ants,” Ronan offers, one finger flagging his objection. “Scary motherfuckers.”

“Myrmecophobia noted. None of this is anywhere near the realm of our expertise.”

Which comprises, in no particular order: hustling, truancy, dying in various degrees of misery and a cohort of sins dressed in or as pizza rolls.

Under soft morning light, Gansey spills particles of presence in the tiny, biting dents of his tempered brogue heels, eating at the steps. Once, twice, the strike of a pendulum. And there, on Ronan’s steps, the mark of man. Someone’s been here, with him. Again. So many ghosts scattered, but the Barns isn’t haunted.

“So…” Ronan drags out, and scours the belly of the paper bag for another bagel, a half of it, crumbs. “Parrish hit the experimental phase of college early. Growing boy.”

Gansey turns to look at him. “Have you considered where he might be getting his instructions?”

“You’re saying, drill him.”

“I’m saying,” but carefully, so carefully, as if the flare of rabies might pass from Adam to Ronan in a heartbeat, if only Gansey blinks, “ _ask_.”

\--

Stitch by stitch, the ragdoll of Adam Parrish patches itself again. In the exile corner of Ronan’s mind, Geppetto’s fingers bleed from rekindling back his favourite creation.

The house smells of damp and cigarettes, stale cinnamon. Wafts of dad’s musky aftershave, like hungry rodents teething at the years. Expensive orchids delivered each Friday for his mother, trimmed with slavish reverence.

But for memories they can’t extirpate, every room is bare. Declan joins him sometimes to look at the yawning beast of their childhood, made matter: pillars, wood, eaves, groaning architecture, grandiose design, smear of inhuman living. 

Hollow bones of bird that learned to fly and flee.

In the midst of the Barns is Adam, hair unbound, first from the strain of whatever arcane geometry he constructs with his fingers each morning, to avoid the pain pangs of a haircut fee; then, from the strain of being _the hair of Adam Parrish_ , identity crushed in each individual strand for the sake of the ambition-driven whole.

Never was Marxism more profoundly adopted than when Adam’s mind took absolute and annihilating governance of his limbs, his nails, his eyes, his failing ears. Not one is allowed pain or weakness or duress that might endanger the community of his glacial reason. There are no colds, no fatigue, no fevers. There is only a schedule, a timeline, an end-goal – and it has decreed, for days now, that Adam can’t be troubled with the torturous configuration of his three work shifts, then school.

If ever there a symptom of Adam’s sickness, it is this cruel and unusual apathy for angry violations against his wallet. He sprawls there, on Ronan’s dusty sofa and exhales deep, as if the muse might soon strike him to consider consumption, or pneumonia, or tuberculosis – some old and greying sickness that will scrape the marrow of the protagonist’s being but leave him beautiful and resigned and heroically stoic, the picture of a gift to the cruel, cruel world that never deserved him.

Adam’s eyes stream to him when Ronan ventures near, half-lidded and serpentine. He slips his legs off the sofa, making room.

Ronan drops down and fills every inch in, like a cat commanding. “So…?”

“So?”

“So,” says Ronan reasonably, because somehow he’s become the adult in this living arrangement, “You wanted to haul ass back into the woodland.”

“You didn’t,” says Adam, and licks the deep, dehydrated indentations of his upper lip. Ronan can’t look away. Can’t stop laughing, like treacle.

“Are we playing the game where you care what I have to say, now? Since when?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Lying down, Adam’s shrug is imperceptible, a minor turbulence of form to honor a point. “You won.”

“Don’t put your cowardice on me.”

Silence, then Adam lifts his hand, to be pulled up. “Like you put your principles on me?”

Ronan helps him. Afterwards, his fingers sting from the warmth of Adam’s wrist – the cauterized space crossed by myriad of scratches, where he bled for his private demon in the marshes. Thumb crosses palm, and he still feels the grit of Adam’s skin beneath it, a coat of something relished and wrong.

“Whatever, man,” Ronan says, to hurt. “You want to go back, you go back. We go back.”

Sitting now, Adam looks terrorised by a migraine the pulse of which reverberates into Ronan, like bloodstream and heartbeat. He looks at Adam, the blue of his gaze suffocated by lethargy, while the loose rope ends of his ankles knot together. His arms stay obedient by his side, slack.

Drowsy like a summer afternoon, until the white of his eyes wakes, and he looks at Ronan, owlish. “You lied.”

“I said –”

“With everything but your mouth, you lied,” Adam parries. It stings to be known so closely, crown of thorns digging into Ronan’s skull. He opens his mouth, but Adam inches in and close, and covers it in a kiss that bridges eternity.

Ronan’s mind is fissures, open cracks of starlight-sharpness that let the afterthought slip in: this is Adam, this is what he does, he uses. This is Adam, and he is whole. And then there is the coalesced certainty of a world where Adam steps back, mouth the softness of ripe berry, swollen under skin that struggles to stretch. Still parched.

Ions and storm. _Have mercy on him, God, because I won’t._

“I’ll go back,” Adam says carefully, a promise. “Alone.”

The moment, whatever it was (sea tide) retreats. Since when the hell does Ronan get a say?

“Gansey’s here,” he betrays instead, lifting himself at the drop of the thirtieth silver.

Adam’s head droops back on the sofa with a groan.

\--

Gansey gives it to Adam good, KO on the first punch, one and done. Boom. Ronan’s in his corner.

Maybe that’s why they don’t invite him in.

Hiding by the door, a fine-print addition to the intimacy of his two _honored guests_ , suffering the gluttony of a cold that feasts on his ears, his toes, the choice cuts on jeans he paid premium money for another man to brutalise. There is quiet, and there is the chessboard evil of Gansey strategizing his pauses, Adam laying down the translucent web of his timid breaths and their traps.

Outside, the vantage point withholds them. If Ronan squints (does squint), he can see the coarse brushstrokes of their figures, reflected in the faraway, long-ago galaxy of the transom glass.

“…aid you wouldn’t mess with his head,” Gansey blots away armistice with sound. White pawn for the killing. First move.

“I’m not.”

“ _Really_.”

“Really.”

“Adam. He’s worr – he’s distressed. Because of you. You went missing for days, then he found you in the – the… the marshes.” _There are marshes in Henrietta_. “He said you’ve been injured and unresponsive. He worries.”

Heat creeps up Ronan’s nape and his shoulders, his spine and the start of his tailbone. An exoskeleton of shame that curls in and in, crustacean, until the shell of him crushes his insides, and he must sit, or he must join water.

He sits down, limbs forgetting themselves, rushing to spread and spill.

“I thought he was distressed,” says Adam, neatly.

“Adam.”

“I’m not messing with his head,” Adam defends, but he’s messing with Gansey’s. Attaboy.

“What are you doing, then?”

“Living, Gansey. Breathing. One day at a time.”

Counting. Always counting.

Along the veranda, grape vine has spawned and spread, and it too counts the seconds until pigeons flee, sun surrenders, rock erodes. Until the house and all of its tenants become its prized and grudging empire, prey to attrition.

It has time, Ronan knows, and raises his hand so (just so) until the print of it covers the vine-slashed wall peering ahead, then the tree beyond it, then the sun above.

It has time, as Ronan has time, and he listens to Gansey fight on.

“You’re acting… in a way some might characterise as self-destructive.” But not Gansey. Never so impolite. “It’s eating him up.”

Adam laugh, wistful like daybreak. “And you want to know how to help _him_.” 

_That’s enough_ , Ronan thinks. _You’re flaying him alive._

But Gansey’s bones turn, and Ronan thinks of the hand that knows better than to court Adam’s shoulder, thinks of it withdrawing, trembling with whiplash. “I’m not indifferent to what’s happening to you either.”

“No. But you didn’t walk all the way here for that conversation.”

“You don’t break like he breaks,” says Gansey, and his sigh is Ronan’s sigh. The dry, distant click of his steps as he must surely be coming to his feet, it deafens. “You leave behind pieces.”

“All the king’s country and all the king’s men can put me back together again.”

“Yes,” Gansey says, so earnest that Ronan aches for the inevitabilities that will assault him.

“How dare you?” There is the ritual of Adam’s anger, blurred, then building, like the chorus of a prayer. “No, how?”

The bow of Adam’s indignation is taut, ready to shoot, to kill. Ronan’s arm drifts down, folds on his knees, cushions the tired press of his cheek. He turns his head on the other side, so his right ear can keep the vigil, so he can hear what Adam might, how he might.

“I know you’re not mine to fix,” Gansey starts, like the platitude of a parental warning before a Halloween slasher flick, still safer than life.

Adam cuts through him, “I’m no one’s to fix. I’m no one’s to sacrifice into breaking. If I’m crumbling, you don’t get to take a step back and enjoy the view, because you’ve taken a calculated risk that I’ll make it out.”

“It’s what you do.”

“And you’ve spent years lording your virtuous indignation about that over me.” Adam laughs, like the grape vine might laugh. Like night horrors laugh, when Ronan dreams of them, instead of dreaming them. “It stops. You do this, today – you prioritise him, over me, because _I can handle it_ – it stops.”

Nothing stops. Time is infinite, motivation is circular, man is cliché.

“Fine. It stops,” Gansey articulates in the careful, erudite pronunciation of a prince who only learned the Queen’s English to curse her to her face. “I stop. I won’t carry on exposing you to the regrettable phenomenon of my concern.”

There is quiet, and there is the chessboard evil of the boy you love, the boy you want to win, the two boys, forsaken without their toys, out of ammunition.

“See that you don’t,” Adam shouts over a flurry of footsteps, and he won, but doesn’t know what to do with it.

The door creaks opens. Exit, the knight in presidential armour.

\--

Some time, an earthquake of mental compromise later, Gansey offers him a hand up. The bone of his wrist trembles with the manly effort of raising Ronan from the grave of his obvious eavesdropping infamy. _He knows,_ they both know. Ronan heard everything.

When Gansey pulls back, it’s to pass a hand through his hair, to right the invisible lines of his polo shirt collar, to shudder and inevitably correct the last few folds of his sport blazer. Ronan sneers, but watches the circus of Gansey becoming the person only one of them ever learned to like.

Between them, they share an unhealthy proportion of global privilege and a monthly Amazon bill that outpaces Henrietta’s contribution to the red-white-and-blue GDP. And the wrath of Adam Parrish has exiled them in the cold.

Twice, Ronan makes to start, before a cough or a shiver destroys him. Twice, Gansey _knows_ , and shuts his eyes against the backhand of wicked, cold, hard truth.

“Which motherfucking part of me looks pretty and witty and gay enough to hook up with all the other damsels in the ivory tower?” Ronan snarls, finally, because the midday sun is waning, and they’ve only got time for the abridged version of his Vesuvian explosion.

“I don’t think of you in that way,” says Gansey, carefully.

Ronan blinks at him. Gansey blinks back. The Geneva conventions are summarily savaged in a targeted war of thick-lashed passive aggression.

“Good. Because I might be going to hell for cocksucking,” _and don’t you fucking dare flinch_ , “but I’m not stepping down another circle for a threesome. Two’s plenty in this relationship.”

Gansey’s war has bled the country dry, the stone of his jaw eroding. “Understood.”

“Is it.”

“Yes,” Gansey draws out, “You think you have this eloquently under control, down to the crisp rendition of religious visuals.”

Gansey’s bite perforates the authenticity of his fine, privately-tutored upbringing. It beggars, more than suspends disbelief. Unlike coups, espionage and magical madness, it’s just _not on brand._

Ronan’s arms overbear his chest, folding. A footnote in the Gordian history of men whose crude creativity wouldn’t get in the way of performative machismo. “I think.”

“Yes, Ronan,” says Gansey, unflinching, and slips both hands in his pockets to rock gently on the balls of his boat-bound feet. “You think. Because you’ve never seen this before. I have. You’re a boy with a cold, and you don’t know you’re running a fever until you’re bed-struck and missing school.”

Until mother’s there, beautiful Aurora, the gold of her hair, the honey of her voice, the cheap, sugary jello of her make-believe medicine. Until the Hallmark life Ronan used to lead collapsed around him in a game of cards less iconic than poker, less apocalyptic than Tarot. He played Go Fish, and then his daddy died.

“School, Gansey? Really?” Ronan’s voice comes out a rasp.

There is light between them, a sign of universal indifference. A blessing of white and grey pallor crisscrossing the steps. Gansey steps into it, close. Despite everything (for it), Ronan wants to produce his car keys, to shepherd them both to the BMW, ride out and never look back. There is no battlefield on which a prince should look at Ronan, so defeated. Not here, in Ronan’s church.

“And what happens then?” Gansey asks, softer than murmurs. “I go to school. I get your books. I turn in essays you don’t write and therapy notes you don’t bring in. Except you don’t come back. For weeks. For months. And when you do, you’re barely there.”

Jesus motherfucking Christ. They’re doing this, going back to Adam and Eve and the apple. They’re rewinding til the tape’s kaput. Ronan doesn’t have the patience or emotional capacity to deal with a long-ago detour into his childhood wrongs. “This isn’t that.”

“Isn’t it?” Earlier, Adam had laughed like this, empty. Emptied out, maggots consuming the apple to its core, crawling under stretched skin. When Ronan shudders again, Gansey’s eyes are on him. He cuts through, “How, pray tell, do you know?”

“What?”

“How can you tell?” Gansey asks reasonably, closing his eyes to absorb the purity of the answer. “What empirical or deductive evidence do you bring to support your argument?”

“I know.” Ronan steadies his breath. “I feel it.”

“I do too.” Gansey’s whole being pulls in, like a spring, conserving tension within himself. Like a body that nurtures the tip of an arrow after a critical hit. As if, the moment he exhales, he’ll bleed out. “Look. I’ve just been reduced to every wrong I’ve ever done or contemplated in the span of a ten-minute conversation. Let’s reschedule the encore.”

“We call that getting torn a new one,” Ronan points out academically.

Some part of Gansey that never died, but lived in Ronan’s heart and warmed and prospered like crops before the summer swelter, is laughing. “I’ll check the state of my biology later.”

“He’s not really fuming about it,” Ronan offers, but lacks the hypocrisy of a seasoned bedside manner, to look Gansey in the eye and say his thin skin and kindly eyes can survive the Parrish epidemic.

“He is – incendiary,” Gansey agrees, with the admiring reticence of a snake lover surveying the pedigree of a cobra. “He’s right to be. I’m not always the best of friends.”

Like cardamom, this is a flavour of self-deprecation that Ronan can correctly identify, but not qualify. There is a residue of beggarliness in baiting flattery that doesn’t suit Gansey, for whom victory should come naturally and willingly, without artifice. The precision of his insincerity, knowing Ronan will put in the token outrage to defend Gansey’s honor, is vulgar.

“You beat me out,” Ronan volunteers finally, and it perks up Gansey’s brows like caffeine and a bad nicotine habit.

“That’s not particularly challenging.”

Ronan whistles. “Bro. You’re supposed to say that’s not the case? Not on.”

Gansey offers his hand again, this time for shaking. He’s leaving, it occurs to Ronan, finally. Not now, but soon. He’s leaving, because he failed.

“Ronan Lynch,” Gansey anoints him, “you are a beloved and well-cherished human disaster. I wouldn’t dream to deprive you of your benchmark status.”

\--

At one point, diplomacy failed, nuclear deals were sundered, trade wars sparked, cave man returned to his bat. And in the wake of civilisation’s retreat into the medieval nether, Gansey asked Ronan to _mediate_.

Sure, man. Whatever.

“White flag,” Ronan calls out, an intruder in his own damned house, toeing in like a prized cat, paws soft and claws retreating. “Don’t do to me what you did to Gansey.”

The only one of Adam’s fingers meant to salute the occasion is already answering the call of duty. The rest of Adam’s lounging where Ronan left him, seemingly pleased to ruin his beauty with that first of ungodly sins, the idle hands.

“It’s insane, isn’t it?” Adam’s voice meanders to and from each corner of the living room, but never fills it out. “How much of our time we spend talking about each other, instead of talking to each other.”

The art of conversation subtracts from that of war. They could never have managed dialogue when they were still planting knives into each other. And, for years, what would there have been to say?

_I see you, I fear you, I want you, I despise you. You are nothing to me, and you are the world. I know you. I know you. I know you._

“Deep, man. You’re a real Mariana trench of wonders.” See, boys and girls, that’s the kind of quip and witticisms only dropping out of high school can win you, cheap and dirty. “Now stop messing with Gansey.”

Funny thing, once Ronan cascades down on the sofa again, slapping Adam’s feet off, then groaning as he accepts them back, straddling his thighs. Funny thing, how he can look with wolves’ eyes all he wants at the door, and he can’t see the stranger’s lurk of Gansey’s shadow behind it. He waits there, Ronan knows.

One of them is always in the room. One of them is always waiting. And the last point of their triangle simply exists.

“Stop messing with Ronan,” Adam parrots him, and digs his heels into the flat landing plane of Ronan’s lap. It would be a welcome distraction, if Adam weren’t all skin and bones, pokes and corners, then malice, to round them out. “Stop messing with Gansey. In the span of one morning, I’ve had two lectures and sought neither of you out. Who’s messing with whom, exactly?”

From this angle, Ronan can see the lines of Adam’s face like God gazing down at His creation, nitpicking the final touches. Misery has always substituted nobility in Adam, but up close and personal, the martyr’s veneer washes thin. He is a frightened, gasping animal, and the magnitude of sheer force alone suggests Ronan could make Adam breathe his last.

Ronan’s heart swells with something between dread and satisfaction. “You’re insane if you think Gansey or me stand a chance against you, even together. You’re in another league.”

“I’m tired, Ronan. That’s all I am.

There are wrong words, Ronan knows sometimes. Now, he avoids them. “Why? No bullshit.”

It’s two very deep breaths before Adam answers him, and then his eyes close. “All that… and nothing came of it.”

“All that,” Ronan agrees, and the stirring of his body answers before he can even ask for clarification. Since this morning, he’s begrudged Adam his hours of rest and relaxation, but not his two days of miracles, cannibalizing his magic. Ronan’s eyes shut dead too, and between cracks of awareness, he hears the bubbling of feverish silence. “How did you… how did you know how to do what you did in the marshes?”

Adam’s heels kick him again, shadows of violence turned colours of play. “Who’s asking?”

“Me,” Ronan murmurs, and retaliates by pinching the fleshy pads of Adam’s toes. They’ll freeze like this, in a house made for a lady and her luxuries, and the eager husband who caters to her whims, but never troubled somehow with teaching his teenage sons how to kickstart the heating.

“No. But it doesn’t matter.” It matters so little, that Adam carries on, “No one would ask you how you did what you did, because everyone would assume, Ronan’s Ronan. Magical. Intrinsically magical. Of course he can do anything. But with me, there are questions.”

“And you’re putting off the answers.”

At the next pinch, Adam’s feet retreat, legs curl in, parts of him start strategically rerouting the whole. They were like this, only an hour again, one beside the other, still strangers. It didn’t go well then. The symmetry might still kill Ronan now.

“Maybe I don’t think you deserve any,” Adam puts in, ploy for a gold star and mercy for the collegiate try.

Only, to hell with phoning cheap shots in. Go big for Moby Dick, or turn the boat back home.

“You wouldn’t fuck someone so unworthy,” Ronan counters.

“We seem to have a very different view of my standards. And of what we did together.”

Ronan’s middle finger rises to the challenge. “That counts.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Is that the most you’ve done with another living, breathing person?”

Wisely, Adam claims the fifth. Ronan’s grin observes the silence, alive in its own right, infectious like oil spill. “Then it counts, Parrish.”

Game, set, match. For the little this has won him, Ronan will take it. Then, Adam lets gravity compel him, dipping into Ronan until their noses crash-collide, their mouths hunt desperately, turn and swallow. A kiss like a secret, shared and leaving one dead. Ronan’s teeth bite in harder, but he still feels himself the casualty.

Tide-bound, Adam pulls away. “I’ve been reading.”

Ronan’s wolf whistle is a long-perfected thing, the kind cartoons imprint and a life of meticulous hooliganism perfects. “Damn, man. Most of us just watch porn.” 

“I meant, magic.” The start of a flush creeps up Adam’s throat, his jaw, his cheeks. Takes no prisoners. “I’ve been reading up.”

“Awesome stuff, nerd brain wonder. Reading what? From where? Books bought with what damned money?”

“I’ve been reading,” Adam says, words liquifying against the glacial cut of reality, “In my dreams.”

Ronan’s too cool to show how impressed he is. Too cool to breathe. “Tell me.”

“Persephone,” Adam bides his time, but looks up. “Persephone came with books in my dreams.”

Ronan’s on him, hawk fast and claws digging into the sides of Adam’s arms. Dreams don’t stray from the maws of the Dream King. “Tell me _everything_.”

\--

Like the first snow on bare crop, Ronan imposes on 300 Fox Way without due consideration for the livelihood he’s set to trample.

Fuck. That’s _farmer Joe_ talk. He’s for the dropped vowels soon, the Henrietta inbreeding, the meeting up with the guys to discuss a hot piece of ass that is very much the whole of a mule and not the part of a supermodel. He always knew honest living would be the death of him.

Maura’s opening the door just as hellion Calla bursts out, stale hair curlers adding to the contrivance of modern age beauty standards, Halloween edition.

“Thought you might be coming,” Maura says, and waves him in, while the Calla and curlers coalition blitzes out. She storms back in with a garden broom that exceeds Blue’s best attempts at height on heels.

Ronan considers it briefly, then Calla. “So she’s getting on that and flying away?”

Maura’s teeth grit. “Sweeping the bad out.”

Bless Ronan’s shark grin, out bright and early. Good work ethic. “Plenty of me to go around.”

Not for the first time before the antics set to terrorise her house, Maura isn’t laughing. She stares at Ronan, then at Calla, and nods them both inside, and like ducks and school children, they go in a row. Over time, Ronan’s contributed enough with baked goods and garden flowers to the Fox Way economy that his presence has been accepted as a natural provincial phenomenon, like Sunday morals and taxes.

Inside is the prime-time domestic disaster that too often seems to strike households whose owners swear to the world and back they never know how this happened: the carpets and curtains have seen better days in hell, dust layered idle and fat, mauves and blues weaving flatter the mould. Every step tires Ronan, feet dragging along as much as they dig in, and in, and in – then raise up.

“…the fuck?” he asks, dreading to look down.

“Swamp’s moving in,” Maura spares him the theatrical reveal, and kindly offers him a pair of undersized rain boots he refuses on principle that his people, the Irish, were proud enough to keep their heads high before adversity, and so Ronan should never give ground in the face of neon pink.

“How do you know?” he asks, because he hates so much of himself, but still not enough to confirm he’s stepped in carpet mud.

Calla stops at the doorway to apply the full force of her anger management issues against the corner of the ceiling. “You just missed the toad squad.”

Shiiiiiiiiiiiit.

“Could be Cabeswater,” Ronan volunteers, and they’re vibing, Maura and he are, she is on his wavelength, nodding.

Then, Calla knocks the ceiling with the broom again.“It’s leaking in. Through the swamp.”

Ronan’s teeth grit, “Why the hell does it need a swamp?”

Calla _looks_ at him, with the iron restraint of a woman holding herself back from asking, _Why the hell does anything need a swamp_? She kicks the cobwebs out of the ceiling with the back of her broom, or the possessed spirit out of her swamp infestation. Ronan’s struggling to tell.

“Up until three days ago, no one talked about any swamp,” Ronan argues, and he’d like this carved inch-deep in whatever stone records logs of Henrietta’s business hours in purgatory.

“It’s been there. Waiting.”

“So now, the swamp thinks. Great. Awesome. Bet it goes to Aglionby.”

“Where there are witches, there are swamps,” Maura starts carefully. “And where there are swamps, there are witches.”

They’re sitting down for this part of the mutual torture crusade that is a classical Ronan Lynch social call exercise. His hands wither around the brimming, steaming devilry of a cup carrying the cursed secretions of _some_ ancient creature or the other, doused in protein powder and the sparkling water Jimi’s convinced passes for _fancy_.

Even Charon wants his golden coin. Ronan drinks, gulps, remembers good boys swallow. (Regrets that instantly).

“There is no world in which you think that explains anything,” he tells Maura when they huddle over a coffee table overrun by weeds and weed.

“What do you think a swamp is?” she asks.

More ceiling-thumping from farther out. “He doesn’t. You invited the wrong one in, Maura.”

“Still not a vampire, Buffty the buck-toothed slayer,” Ronan growls, but bears the humiliation of knowing he’s occasioned an opportunity for Calla to be _right_ , and he will forgive himself for many offences in his young life, but not this horror.

Maura inches even closer without intruding, as if her every next word depends on Ronan’s potential for dumbstruck credulity. She was pretty, half a lifetime ago, he supposes. The rawness of her, the mild, contained manner – the Adam opacity of her smiles. If Ronan were a different boy, of different persuasions, perhaps he might have liked her in the way of teenagers, sauntering every other day by her doorway for half a cup of sugar and a whole lot of look at the dangerous slip of her generous cleavage.

She begins, “A swamp is a… layer of purgatory, if you like.” He doesn’t. “The waters cling. You ever seen a corpse pulled out? Looks just like the day the swamp called it in.”

“That’s basic science.”

“So is every other aspect of magic. Swamps preserve. They help manifest. They safeguard, until the right witch comes forward to bring out what’s waiting inside of them. From death unto the living.”

From sickness, into health, from water into wine. Transfiguration’s too old school for this new age bullshit. Storms roar leonine in the prison cell between Ronan’s temples. Calla sets the broom down.

“But sometimes, that thing… is too strong to be contained,” Maura whispers, and there was bile in that tea they gave him, rot or experiment, heinous and septic. He feels infected to the core of his tissue, a cancer of sleeping truth growing and growing, eyes and claws and teeth, and ripping him from the inside.

“And it starts leaking,” he says, without meaning to, and drip on his shoulder, drip on his cheek, drop in his greenish tea-poison. From the ceiling, the swamp threatens to come down.

“Now that you got what _you_ wanted,” Calla says, and somehow she’s beside him, “Tell us what Adam’s been up to.”

In the distance, Ronan hears the start of toad song.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the support and patience. Long live golem toad.


End file.
